September 7, 2009

The Property and Freedom Society conference, hosted annually in lovely Bodrum, Turkey, by Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is an eye-opening experience in urbanity for provincial Americans like myself. For the benefit of monoglot Anglophones, the speeches are all in English, but many of the Continental speakers, such as economist Jorg Guido Hülsmann, are more suavely articulate in their second, third, or fourth languages than I am in my one and only.

Fortunately, the presence in Bodrum of Paul E. Gottfried—the distinguished intellectual historian, VDARE.com contributor, and coiner of the term "paleoconservative"—demonstrated that not all Americans are as unsophisticated as I am.

Each time I passed Dr. Gottfried in the gleaming lobby of the Hotel Karia Princess, he seemed to be carrying on a lively conversation in a different language. He was even rumored to have started acquiring some Turkish, a non-Indo-European language from the Asian steppe whose mere placenames (e.g., the nearby resort of Göltürkbükü) baffled me with their unfamiliarity.

Gottfried’s energetic erudition reminded me of the international man of mystery who saves the day in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, "Mr. Baldwin", who plays world-class ping-pong while keeping up all the while "a bright, bantering conversation in demotic Greek" and "singing snatches of lugubrious Baltic music" in Swedish.

Gottfried’s new memoir, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, provides an ideal introduction to the works of this scholar, who is perhaps the most acute "political genealogist" of our time.

56 comments:

I find Gottfried's incessant whining of how neocons and other villains have torpedoed his academic career distasteful. He takes himself too seriously. I've read one of his monographs (I think it was "The Strange Death of Marxism"), and it really read more like a partisan rant than a scholarly study, much like his online articles. This memoir, however, sounds somewhat interesting, because the people he has known are more interesting than Gottfried himself.

Gottfried can be prescient on topics he has studied with great care. For example, Gottfried wrote an essay in Modern Age in 1983(!), finding fault with the Neocon worldview and suggesting that unless the conservative movement moved away from the Neocons they would fail to accomplish much in way of meaningful reform. In that essay, which the Neocons didn’t like at all, Gottfried noted that the Neocons liked the policies of FDR and to a great extent, LBJ. If his points had been taken to heart back then, we could’ve avoided the mess we are in now.

I'm also glad it was you, and coming to think of it you're the right guy to translate Gottfried's sometimes hard on the eyes writing for ordinary semi-literates like ourselves. You quote Gottfried on the neocons' view of the modern state:At the heart of that body of beliefs and feelings is a leftist vision of the world, one in which historical nations are replaced by aggregations of individuals held together by a shared belief in equality and ‘human rights.’ … Both their enthusiasm for Third World immigration and their opposition to immigration restrictionists flow from their view that populations are interchangeable."

OK, that makes sense. But why then do they make such a glaring exception when it comes to Israel? Why is tradition and ethnicity such an important thing to protect in Israel, but everywhere else it's exchangeable? Do they fear that if the same rules applied to them and they were "exchanged", humanity might not be as "enlightened” anymore, that there would be no qualified overseers remaining? Btw, it seems Gottfried also subscribes to this bipolar worldview.

There is now a debate over on the unauthorized right between zealous critics of Jewish influence in Western countries and those who, like myself, believe that WASPdom has destroyed itself. To put my cards on the table: I’ve never heard American Jews or American blacks pour as much contempt on white Protestant America as I hear coming from white Protestant intellectuals and clergypersons.

If "WASPdom has destroyed itself" who is making a debate about it "unauthorized"? Why?

The tirades against WASP nativism and close-mindedness, often produced by their tribe, have caused me to wonder by what ethereal standard these critics are judging their past.

There is far less need to wonder about the contempt-filled tirades and guilt inducement often produced by members of the jewish tribe. Yet, to say something similar about jewry as Gottfried says about WASPdom is ever more likely to get you thrown in prison. It isn't an "ethereal standard", it's a double standard.

Does the distinguished intellectual historian believe WASPdom is responsible for all this too?

Dr. Gottfried seems to misunderstand anti-Semitism. It is a nineteenth century term devised to distinguish between old-fashioned opposition to Judaism (common to German Catholics as well as just about everybody else in Western Civilization)and opposition to Jews as members of an intrinsically hostile ethnic group (whose DNA made them enemies). This new ideology was promoted by radical nationalists and found its consummation in National Socialism. The successful conflation of these two quite different phenomena in the public mind is one of Judaism's great public relations triumphs. Any opposition to Israel, any Jew or any obnoxious Jewish religious or cultural practice means you're a Nazi and want to rebuild the gas chambers.

Unfortunately, Nixon's pessismism made him a defeatist. His foreign and domestic policies involved an attempt to outflank his political opponents by stealing their issues for his political benefit (detente, civil rights, price controls, etc.). He also had a strong streak of cynicism ("let 'em eat rhetoric") that allowed him to betray the Right, confident that they had nowhere else to go.

When I knew Dr. Gottfried in Washington 23 years ago, he said he had read Karl Marx's entire oeuvre -- in German. That's how thorough he is, in this case on his specialty, 19th Century German intellectual history.

It's a mark of American intellectual decline that he doesn't teach at a major university, and his books are not published by major publishing houses. Where are the rich people that should have endowed a chair for him at Harvard or Yale, or founded an institute for him, or subsidized his books?

Paul Gottfried is one of the kindest and most encouraging scholars in academic. Although a ferocious polemicist who's drawn some truly disgraceful attacks, in person he's a kindly man who takes the time to share his knowledge with younger scholars and people entirely outside the academy. This is a wonderful appreciation of him. I hope it gets wide circulation that it deserves.

opposition to Jews as members of an intrinsically hostile ethnic group (whose DNA made them enemies)

If HBD-Darwinists* took their HBD-Darwinism seriously, then that would have to be their position, as well.

But I'm not sure that very many HBD-Darwinists have thought their beliefs through to their beliefs' logical conclusions.

[Or maybe they have, but they just don't want to reveal their thinking in polite society.]

*And if you were going to be completely honest with yourself, then you'd have to consider the possiblity that there are HBD-Darwinists in the Jewish community who also cling to that position [from the opposite point of view].

Regarding the column mentioned by Tanstaafl, I noticed that while Gottfried claims:

"One of my most vivid graduate school memories was listening to a speech given by Yale President Kingman Brewster expressing unqualified support for the Black Panthers."

According to his faculty page at Elizabethtown, Gottfried completed his Ph.D. in 1967.

Kingman Brewster actually spoke on April 23, 1970. Can anyone who's read the memoir comment on where Gottfried was at the time? In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to have to assume Gottfried read about Brewster's comment in the newspaper and his "vivid" memory has help from his imagination.

For the record, here's what Brewster actually said:

"In spite of my insistence on the limits of my official capacity, I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States."

On April 15, in Cambridge, 1,500 demonstrators showed up for a march at Harvard -- only to find the Harvard gates along their parade route locked shut. Incensed demonstrators smashed windows, threw rocks, lit fires. Some 214 people were hospitalized; $100,000 worth of property was destroyed. At the rally, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman vowed that marchers would burn down Yale on May 1.

The patricians entrusted with Yale University's future knew it was time to swing into action.

Yep, WASPs did it to themselves.

While I find Brewster's spinelessness contemptible, the evidence suggests he was acting "pragmatically" to defuse a potentially highly-destructive situation created by black and Jewish radicals rather than wallowing in guilt.

*And if you were going to be completely honest with yourself, then you'd have to consider the possiblity that there are HBD-Darwinists in the Jewish community who also cling to that position [from the opposite point of view].

You "counter"-semites realize that the HBD blogfather himself is half-Jewish (and says he was quite philo-semitic in an earlier phase in his life), right?

The 2 most embarrassing features of HBD: the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism

HBDers usually aren't antisemites.

Those commenters are normally Stormfront posters (who for some reason keep posting as "Anonymous").

Yeah. He includes Kevin MacDonald's page in his blogroll.

He does. And Marx expressed many antisemitic sentiments.

But "hyperethnocentrism" doesn't have to be conscious according to the distinguished community college professor, Kevin MacDonald. And Steve has shown signs of philosemitism (aka, "hyperethnocentrism") in the past.

HBD also includes a number of Jews such as Mencius Moldbug, HalfSigma, and other bloggers and commenters as well as "Judeaized intellectuals" such as Charles Murray and John Derbyshire.

So I find it rather amusing that so many antisemites and Stormfronters keep commenting (and spamming) on iSteve when HBD could very well meet the antisemite's definition of a "Jewish intellectual movement".

as well as "Judeaized intellectuals" such as Charles Murray and John Derbyshire.

Umm....I'm afraid of criticizing Jews (or even just mentioning them really) in public as well. Does this mean I'm "Judeaized" as well? In that case, does this mean that my country, and indeed much of the world, is "Judeaized" as well? If so, doesn't this support MacDonald, Duke, et al, more than anything?

Anonymous Prosemite said... these groups are one and the same, and are made up of people upset by any group who can simultaneously maintain both a full set of teeth and a mean IQ higher than theirs.

The Undiscovered Jew said... Those commenters are normally Stormfront posters (who for some reason keep posting as "Anonymous").

Y'all are doing an excellent job of combating antisemitism. It's really hard to understand why anyone would dislike Jews. The more I read comments like these the more I understand why America's number one priority must be maintaining the security of Israel as a Jewish state. Keep up the great work!

So I find it rather amusing that so many antisemites and Stormfronters keep commenting (and spamming) on iSteve when HBD could very well meet the antisemite's definition of a "Jewish intellectual movement".

This is an interesting point that should be addressed.

I think the primary reason that I would not consider it a "Jewish intellectual movement" as described by community college professor MacDonald is that it lacks the rabbinical/ charismatic core figure - the Freud or Ayn Rand - around whom the entire field revolves. HBD - to the extent that it exists at all - is based in science and not ideology. Its' contents are not subject to sudden revision at the whims of the patriarch. It itsn't - or isn't yet - a movement of this kind.

That it might eventually become a field totally dominated by Jews who systematically suppress any consideration of Jewish group behavior that might be troublesome is, as you point out, well underway.

Indeed, I type this message out in full knowledge that it has a 50-50 chance of being posted. At some point, chances of reasonable posts with substantive observations about Jews - as opposed to grousing and grumbling - will fall, and I and many others will simply stop even bothering to type them out. This is obviously because Steve is afraid of running afoul of all those WASPs who are so intent on self destruction that they can't allow any free speech.

The people you name - Pinker, Moldbug, Derbyshire - are all eminently untrustworthy as scientists and essayists where the JQ is concered.

Pinker conspired in open view with Slate's Judith Shulevitz to suppress community college professor Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique by reminding her that her denunciations of his work were giving him more readers.

Moldbug is notorious for denying any co-ordinated Jewish activity in the United States of any kind. He is on record as saying the "Palestinian Lobby" has much greater cultural and political weight than AIPAC and that the Jews in the United States who actually have politcal power don't think of themselves, or act, as Jews. All of this on the fact that his father was in the State Department.

Moldbug is so breathtakingly dishonest that Sailer himself had to appear on a blog to talk him down from some especially embarrassing assertion regarding Jews and their political and cultural non existence.

Murray and Derbyshire are hirelings (I think the term "running dog" would be better for Derbyshire) who live in fear of their masters. Both are interesting writers and thinkers, and both distort the study of history and society in a foundational way in order to attain status, funding, political goals, etc.

In other words, I think that Undiscovered Jew has a good point. HBD is not currently a movement of the sort profiled by community college professor Kevin MacDonald, grouped around a charismatic rabbinical figure, but it could easily become something like the Frankfurt School, a grouping of impressive Jewish intellects dedicated to the suppression, as Undisco'd Jew is, of inconvenient facts. Indeed, I find this a very likely outcome of the whole movement.

What remains can be repackaged into Stephen Pinker's dream of 'Darwinian leftism', where sociobiological knowledge is used to bypass that troublesome 'human nature' governor currently keeping the most demented aspects of Far Left social engineering at bay. Nurtureshock's discussion of how to use information about neurological development in infants to bypass, short-circuit, or better repress natural and healthy in-group/ out-group neural modules - led, as we have seen in the Newsweek excerpt, by Jewish researchers - is already underway. In search of a more perfect union, the bright, sunlit, upperlands - - where, as always, the ability of all groups save Jews to politcally articulate themselves is totally destroyed.

"I assume that Mr Brewster actually spoke on dates other than that one."

It's unlikely, to say the least, that Brewster expressed "unqualified support" for the Black Panthers in a speech while Gottfried was a graduate student. For one thing, the Black Panther Party wasn't formed until October 1966, and it obtained no real publicity before May 1967. No BPP chapter existed outside California before 1968. Finally, if Brewster was giving speeches to students expressing "unqualified support" for the BPP in 1967, I don't think "gasps" would have been heard when Brewster expressed mild, politically-calculated quasi-support at a faculty meeting in 1970.

I'm certain Gottfried's comment was inspired by the 1970 speech, but if you can find evidence for earlier remarks on the BPP by Brewster outside of Gottfried's vivid memory, you're welcome to present it.

The prevalence of anti-semitism in this comment section has kept me from giving money to Steve - something I used to do proudly - for years. Criticism of patterns within Jewish behavior, as Steve engages in sometimes, is fine, but much of what I read here goes well beyond what I consider the line between legitimate criticism and anti-semitism.

The thing that distinguishes this blogsite is that it's populated by an array of strong commenters and, though many are prejudiced in one or another way (as we must all be, to some extent) and may definitely be considered propagandists for one or another viewpoint, most are, in the main, quite "honest propagandists"--that's by no means a contradiction in terms: even in propagandizing, the honest (especially with himself) man lays himself open to arguments whose approach to truth is recognizably closer than his own. And, even as ultimate truths may be elusive, closer approaches are always beneficial. Minds do change.

I'm certain Gottfried's comment was inspired by the 1970 speech, but if you can find evidence for earlier remarks on the BPP by Brewster outside of Gottfried's vivid memory, you're welcome to present it.

So you are "certain" that what you want to believe is true, based on the flimsiest evidence possible, but you invite me to prove to your satisfaction that it is not?

If somebody says, "Jews favor nationalism and ethnocentrism for themselves but regard it as Nazism when other people do it", there are a couple of possible legitimate responses.

One of them is not "Shut up, you filthy toothless anti-semites!".

If the proposition above is wrong, explain why it is wrong. If it is right, explain why you think it is no big deal. But do not simply ignore the central point in contention and skip ahead to ad hominems.

The prevalence of anti-semitism in this comment section has kept me from giving money to Steve - something I used to do proudly - for years. Criticism of patterns within Jewish behavior, as Steve engages in sometimes, is fine, but much of what I read here goes well beyond what I consider the line between legitimate criticism and anti-semitism.

I recognize, criticize, and reject your own lame exhibition of one of the strongest patterns of jewish behavior - attempting to dictate what is or isn't legitimate.

Well said sir. Might I proffer a more helpful definition of "anti-Semite"?

Ineradicable anti-Jewish sentiment. I don't consider myself an anti-Semite, because I'd throw a party if even a plurality of Jews offered a relationship of genuine reciprocal amity.

To frame it in a reference liberals can understand, imagine you're a black man living under institutional slavery or apartheid who's accused of racism every time he complains about his treatment at the hands of whites.

It's also the most selective of the Cal States in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Judith Shulevitz (Slate, New York Times) thinks less of the CSU system than you, Steve:

http://www.slate.com/id/1004446/

But, remarkably, to Culturebox's knowledge, no American evolutionary psychologist has publicly objected to his work. This is not to say that it has been celebrated. A man in his 50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach.

Now, why would Shulevtiz characterize the school as third rate, if it in fact were not?

And why would The Undiscovered Jew refer to MacDonald as a community college professor if he were not?

The implication, that Jews are so unhinged by hatred that they would stoop to any lie, seems unpersuasive to me. Therefore, I think we should not shy away from the facts in this matter, namely that Kevin MacDonald teaches at a third rate community college.

The prevalence of anti-semitism in this comment section has kept me from giving money to Steve - something I used to do proudly - for years.

Useful ideas will receive cash infusions, dissemination, and the acclaim of 'world opinion'. Ideas that are not useful will be starved to death, or exposed to comment in Slate Magazine.

What sort of third-rate college did you go to Steve? We might all be reading about your academic qualificiations one day in a major magazine. Perhaps it will be an article by Miss Shulevitz, calling the whole of academe and publishing to shut you up.

There's nothing dishonest about calling Cal State Long Beach a third rate college. It all depends upon how many rates you have.

If Cal Tech is a first rate college, Stanford a second rate college, Berkeley a third rate college, and UC Irvine a fourth rate college, then Cal State Long Beach would be a fifth rate college, down with UC Riverside and UC Merced, but above a whole lot of 6th, 7th, and 8th rate four-year colleges.

There's nothing dishonest about calling Cal State Long Beach a third rate college. It all depends upon how many rates you have.

I think you're looking for the term 'rank' or 'tier'.

The connotations of the phrase 'third rate' are unmistakeable.

Moreover, the term 'third rate' is used only when describing MacDonald. When the article quotes other CSU professors, ones who do not paint outside the lines, they are simply Professor. Which is, the last time I checked, standard journalistic practice. We never read of the 'rate' or rank of the research institute which has produced results more agreeable to the Standard Model.

That is rank dishonesty, though presented in such a way that it is subject to Talmudic qualification ("it's technically true").

Kevin McDonald will never rise above associate professor at a college of any tier. The fact that he has kept his present position is testament to the powers of tenure (otherwise the SPLC Bundists would have had him fired long since). BTW, it is no mean trick to attain a full-time professorship at ANY college or university nowadays - they prefer a part-time/per diem proletariat.

How do the Undiscovered jew and shulevitz rationalise attacks on Kevin Macdonald in light of jewish tradition which according to dennis prager, regards the humiliation of a man in public to be the equivalent of murder?

"I guess this must be sarcasm, since the only comments posted since my "threat" (which is not a threat, but just a fact) have been from the usual suspects."__

Hey, you figured this out pretty quick.

Obviously, your attempt at 'moralistic' aggression intimidation against those White 'gentiles' simply looking out for their legitimate national interests is not working here.

And the only 'usual suspect' here is you -

[...] Competitive moralism, of which we see too much, is driven by something amoral and animalistic: it is the age-old struggle for supremacy, the competition of rivals, placed in more respectable terms. The struggle becomes absurd — not in its underlying aims which are ever natural — but in the ever greater distance between high claims and base motives, wherewith the only point is in outdoing one’s rivals in “goodness” whilst not actually caring a damn whether anything good will come of it. Intellectual life — that supposedly higher sphere and haven from beastly struggle — becomes diseased with it, even such that, in terrible and political times, there is a delirium of the senses, and a dulling of the faculties, except for the primitive and still acute instincts for success. [...]

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